# Ladies:  how do I color my hair?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ladies-how-do-i-color-my-hair/368529>\
**Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\
**Created:** [August 13, 2006, 6:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ladies-how-do-i-color-my-hair/368529 "2006-08-13T06:57:37Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![Oy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/bc8723/32.png) [@Oy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Oy)\
**Post date:** [August 13, 2006, 6:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ladies-how-do-i-color-my-hair/368529/21 "2006-08-13T18:33:36Z")

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[QUOTE=Fish]  
I’m not worried about waiting six months to try it — that doesn’t bother me at all. I don’t have to do it _immediately._ After this show is over, I might try out for “The Gazebo,” so if I got in that, that’d be another 10 weeks before I did anything else drastic to my hair.

It’s really short, not hard to grow out and cut off the dyed parts, and if it’ll make things easier, I can wait. 🙂  
[/QUOTE]

In that case, I’d say for the black to make sure you get permanent color rather than temporary, but even then there’s no guarantee that it will turn out black black (but the permanent colors are more reliable, or at least they used to be, so I understood). Your hair sounds dark enough that it should, though. Then wait until it grows out entirely to try the blonde streaks. Because your hair is naturally pretty dark and short, it’s not going to show much while it’s growing out - lighter roots don’t show up in dark hair nearly as much as dark roots show up in light hair.

It’s when you try to put one color on top of another that you can get very strange results, regardless of whether you are going dark to light, or light to dark. My next door neighbor has naturally dark brown hair, which she has bleached in part or full for years. She decided to try to go back to her natural shade, got a very dark brown (almost black) dye, and ended up with a weird medium auburn color. If you want to put color over color, you should absolutely go to a pro, and be prepared for it to take quite a while if your hair doesn’t want to give up the color it’s already taken.

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**Author:** ![Ferret\_Herder](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/e47774/32.png) [@Ferret\_Herder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ferret_Herder)\
**Post date:** [August 13, 2006, 7:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ladies-how-do-i-color-my-hair/368529/22 "2006-08-13T19:43:25Z")

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Don’t trust that the semi-permanent will “wash out” - every time I’ve done that, it’s been damned close to permanent except that it fades somewhat. I still end up growing it out anyway.

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